About the Ombudsperson

Arturo E. Hernandez is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston and an expert in bilingualism and second language acquisition. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying bilingual language processing, supported by funding from the NIH and NSF.

Hernandez has served on the National Institutes of Health Language and Communication Study Section, the European Research Council Advanced Grant panel, and the National Academies Panel on English Language Learners. He is Editor-in-Chief of both Perspectives on Psychological Science and the Journal of Neurolinguistics. He has held prestigious fellowships, including a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award to collaborate with Prof. Dr. Christian Fiebach in Frankfurt.

His work introduced Neurocomputational Emergentism, a framework explaining how the brain reorganizes over time to support complex processes like language. A Fulbright Scholar in 2019, he expanded his research on bilingualism and aging at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. Hernandez is the author of Mastery and The Bilingual Brain, reflecting his lifelong journey of learning four languages.